Dreams Under Glass at Elliott Bay Book Company; Daughters of the Air, a staff pick at Left Bank Books,; practicing my smize; the traditional book haul on hotel bed picture; signing books at the Lanternfish Press table.

Coming back to Seattle for AWP after having moved away nearly four years ago stirred up all kinds of feelings. I’m glad I decided to make a very specific plan to keep feelings of overwhelm in check. Bright and early on Thursday morning, I started with a panel on medical memoir as I think ahead to expanding my pieces in Newsweek, Healthline, and Catapult into a book (though to be clear, that book would be far in the future).

Health and Illness Narratives: Harnessing Medical Memoir to Impact a Broken System

Featuring: Mary Pan, Emily Maloney, Rana Awdish, Emily Silverman, Suzanne Koven

Each of the panelists at this discussion are both writers and health care practitioners, and each read briefly before the discussion began. Emily Silverman, who runs The Nocturnists, a storytelling community for healthcare workers, read an uplifiting piece from JAMA titled “Comic Relief,” about meeting her idol Kate McKinnon. Emily Maloney read a tense excerpt from her essay collection The Cost of Living, about being a 23-year-old ER tech working at a hospital under the cloud of an enormous debt while carrying her own medical debt from an attempted suicide at age 19. Rana Awdish read a troubling excerpt from her memoir In Shock, about a terrible abdominal surgery done partly without anesthesia and being accused of being a drug addict. Suzanne Koven, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician read “The Doctor’s New Dilemma,” about struggling to ration out her time and emotional energy. Mary Pan read a harrowing memoir of her husband trying to get psychiatric help for paranoia and suicidal ideation and being told he’d have to wait at least a week—until she got on the phone and used her knowledge of the healthcare system to get him an appointment the next day—I still remember the image of him drawing the tip of a pair of scissors on his arm after she returned from nursing their eight-month-old child. What an image.

The panelists talked about the importance of storytelling. Awdish said that during the pandemic, the disbelief in science would have made her less compassionate toward patients who didn’t mask or get vaccinated, if she hadn’t also maintained a practice of storytelling and writing. Koven said the healthcare system dehumanizes patients, caretakers, and families but storytelling rehumanizes them; Easy Beauty is a memoir that helped show physicians they had no training for caring for patients with disabilities. Maloney said that helping healthcare workers tell their stories will help them advocate for improving the healthcare system. Awdish added that flipping between the point of view of patient and physician helped show her systemic problems in the healthcare system. I loved this quote from Suzanne Koven, who wasn’t sure if she read it somewhere or just came up with it: A doctor’s account of illness is a Victorian novel spanning many years but a patient’s account is a Virginia Woolf novel where every moment matters.

They also talked about voices that need to be included in the canon of illness narratives, which seem to be dominated by male physicians. We need to hear more from female physicians, patients, care givers, family members, cafeteria workers, medical helicopter pilots, and so on. An audience member asked about the ethics of patient memoir and whether that is self-exploitative. Maloney, who has a background in bioethics, said there really isn’t the same restriction as with a healthcare practitioner writing about patients; just write something honest and true that supports your experience, and don’t think about whether it is “too much” until after you’ve written. Suzanne Koven quoted Anne Lamott: “Tell the story, we’ll call the lawyers later.” A comment from the audience also brought up medical apartheid; the audience member said she’d been writing poetry but was considering switching to essays to find a broader audience; the panelists recommended Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America and Take My Hand a novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez about the forced sterilization of African-American women. I hope that member of the audience gets their stories out.

This was an excellent panel and I’m glad it was early on in the conference before I got too tired!

The Lyric Essay as Resistance: A Reading and Celebration

Featuring Chloe Garcia Roberts, Chelsea Biondolillo, Molly McCully Brown, Hea-Ream Lee, Michael Torres

This reading celebrated the anthology The Lyric Essay as Resistance from Wayne State University Press. As I could have anticipated, I was already tired and did not take as many notes though it was very lovely to listen to each of the readers. I appreciated the panelists defining “resistance” in a number of ways. Lee called it resisting against forms, focusing on images and moving fluidly among timelines. Torres talked about arranging memories non-linearly. Brown asked: what shapes, architectures, bodies are you not seeing on the page—keep the lyric essay wild. Lee mentioned that expansiveness of form allows for invention. This was all reassuring as I bumble around in my lyric essay collection figuring out what feels right for each piece. Onward!

A Very Important Karaoke Party

During the day on Friday, I had a lovely time signing books at the Lanternfish Press table (some pictures above) and it was so nice to meet people who’d read the book or were eager to. Then that night I went to A Very Important Karaoke Party, a night of parody songs around the theme of the writing life at Hugo House. Paulette Perhach organized the event and I was delighted to help write a song based on “Under Pressure” called “Little Green Monster,” all about envy (and forgiving yourself and trying to overcome it). It was fun to see someone else belt it out with a fake Freddie Mercury mustache and very cathartic to sing along with all the songs in the back of the room where no one could hear my individual voice (the only way I will do karaoke!).

I am sure there are many more things I could have mentioned here about trip, but dang if I go on & on. It was great to reconnect with so many folks from my life in Seattle and I hope we can get back sooner than in four years. And I can’t wait to dive into the delicious books we acquired at the book fair (pictured above). If you went to the conference, feel free to share some highlights in the comments!

January is almost over. Is it too late for a blog post on setting intentions? I would venture not! The pandemic and being a new parent (do I still get to say "new" now that my child is one?) is a constant reminder to be gentle with myself and find the right level of ambitious that I find fulfilling without giving myself a migraine.

What soldiering through a migraine feels like?

So what are my writing and publishing goals for this year? With my second novel releasing from Lanternfish Press in late September, I have to be mindful of the marketing and publicity work just around the corner. I learned with my first novel, Daughters of the Air, that marketing and publicity can be ::e n d l e s s:: I do like it! But I also need to keep space for work-work, creative writing, and life.

I started writing my second novel two days after I began submitting my first novel—with a haiku workshop as a palate cleanser in between. I started writing my third novel, my current work-in-progress, just a year after starting my second novel. It's a long story as to why that I won't get into here, but I was heartened to learn that Jess Walter juggles multiple book projects simultaneously, and I'm sure many other writers do as well. Welp! The big hope for this year is I "finish" that third novel. (NB: Here's my silly essay "How to Finish a Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years"; I love that this essay landed in The Nervous Breakdown.)

My other writing goal is write two more essays for the collection that I began the same year as Novel #3. I'm taking an essay writing class through Atlas Obscura, where I've been having a great time teaching fairy tale writing. It'll be my first time as a student since taking a wonderful Hugo House class in 2016 with Alexander Chee on making fictional characters of historic figures, and I'm really looking forward to it. My plan is to write one piece arising from the class and one essay after finishing reading A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, which I have ordered from one of my favorite Chicago bookstores, Exile in Bookville, which is located in one of my favorite buildings in the city.

That's it for my writing. I think those are plenty of goals for the year, given what I've got on my plate. I stopped aiming for 100 rejections per year a few years ago, though I do think it's a good goal to have if you're starting the submissions process and need to develop a callous against rejection. By my calculations, I had a 17% acceptance rate in 2021 so I do need to aim a little higher as my general goal, per advice from Creative Capital, is 10%. But I'm not going to tear my hair out over this one. As I say to my son, "Gentle! Gentle!"

My last goal is to continue to help emerging writers stretch their craft and hone their approach to getting their work out in the world. If you have short stories or a novel you're working on and if you'd like to work one-on-one with me, you can check out my coaching and consulting page at Hugo House here.

What are your goals for 2022? Any special plans for writing, reading, publishing? Or maybe you want to learn to cook something special this year? My cooking is toddler-centric now, but I've been dipping in and out of Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I love her opinions: "Powdered rosemary must be shunned." Onward & upward & twirling, twirling, twirling!

I can count on one hand how many publications I had this year, but it was a year full of tremendous personal highlights. Mainly: M. & I became parents in January! One day when I catch my breath I will write about that journey. There's a lot to say, and I need a lot of childcare to get it done. :)

In February, Capra Review published my short story "The Samoyed." Here's an excerpt I like:

In a large glass case beside a tapestry where the beast was hunted and speared, the horn of a narwhal gleamed. “To prove the existence of unicorns, men would drag back these tusks from poor old narwhals. The horn of a unicorn would have remarkable curative qualities, they claimed, for anything from rheumatism to insomnia to impotence.” Robert and Jane walked on into other rooms. The docent’s voice trailed behind them. “You could grind it up into a powder.” Jane imagined sprinkling narwhal horn powder atop her head, imagined coarse, white sand falling through a shaft of sunlight, an iridescent shower of skittering grains.

keep reading

In June, Orion Magazine published my lyric essay "A Dill in Every Soup." Following the medieval theme of the prior excerpt, here's another excerpt I like:

“During the Middle Ages,” WebMD tells me, “people used dill to defend against witchcraft and enchantments.”

keep reading

Finally, in November, Scablands Books, based in Spokane, put out their beautiful anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest, edited by Sharma Shields and Maya Jewell Zeller. I have two short fairy tales in this volume. Why not pick up a copy from Spokane's Wishing Tree Books or Auntie's? Here's an excerpt from "Moss Child":

A lace of bright lichen crept up her arms, chin, cheeks. The green crept from her limbs up the sides of the thickened tree trunks, under so much soft moss that the echoes of footsteps and animal sounds grew muffled in the gulch.

Another very bright spot of the year was chatting with Karen Russell at Hugo House's Novel Nights. Here is Italo Calvino's essay "Lightness," which is a favorite of mine and which she brought up in conversation.

There's much to look forward to in 2022. Among other things, I am especially hoping there will be a COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5. In the meantime, I'm teaching a few virtual classes for Hugo House and Atlas Obscura, January-April, both over Zoom and in an asychronous format. Maybe I will make to AWP in Philadelphia in March? As that is Lanternfish Press's homebase, it would be sweet. Then in the fall Lanternfish Press will release my second novel. Huzzah! I also have a couple short publications in the pipeline, another lyric essay and a short story.

But before all that, I am turning back to revising my third novel and sinking deeper into Maggie O'Farrell's beautiful and absorbing novel Hamnet. Hope you have a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season!

Yesterday, I got a sneak peek at a song Sean Morse is writing in response to Daughters of the Air for Word Play: Original Music inspired by Seattle7Writers. The theme of the concert (happening on March 2 at Hugo House) is "Transformations," which is certainly fitting for the metamorphoses in my novel. But it's also super cool to experience a transformation of one art form to another. And what a honor to have one's own work transformed!

I've long used visual art as inspiration for my writing. I've also reflected upon writing in response to music and dance. Whenever I'm stuck in my writing taking in another form helps. (Long walks also help, almost always.) Hearing Sean's concepts and interpretations gave a whole other dimension to the difficult mother-daughter relationship in my book, and the larger societal problem of looking away from atrocity. I'm looking forward to sharing a link to all the songs once they're recorded—Sean's has been looping in my head all day today!

And, I'm excited to hear songs from the rest of the Bushwick Book Club, which is such a neat organization that has put on numerous concerts launching from classics, new releases, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and the like. Several years ago, The Furnace partnered with BBC and Bradford Loomis wrote a beautiful song in response to my short story "More Like Home Than Home" which is now on his album Banner Days.

So, on March 2, Sean Morse, Alex Guy and Joy Mills will perform music inspired by Daughters of the Air. Wes Weddell, Simon Kornelis, and Reggie Garrett will perform music inspired by Michael Schmelter's book of poetry Blood Song. And, Amanda Winterhalter, Nottingham/Wicks, and Nessa Grasing will perform music inspired by Laurie Frankel's novel This is How it Always Is.

Hearing all of these transformations live will be a real treat. If you're in Seattle, I hope you can make it! Proceeds from ticket sales will benefit STYLE: Songwriting Through Youth Literature Education.

Every summer, I am simultaneously excited for and stressed out by the Seattle Public Library and Seattle Arts & Lectures Adult Book Bingo program and Women in Translation Month, which happens in August. These are supposed to be fun efforts to read a lot, and they are fun, and yet I develop anxieties about time. (Ah, time. I am forever losing to time.) In any case, the 2018 book bingo card was recently released, and I eagerly printed out a copy and penciled in my aspirations for the season.So, what are some books on my docket? My ideal reading diet consists of reading fiction, poetry, and nonfiction simultaneously, and my current reading manages three bingo squares:

• Takes Place in the Area You Were Born: 10:04 by Ben Lerner. Lerner will give a talk at Hugo House on August 9, on the novel as a curatorial form. Intriguing!
• Poetry or Essays (why, why aren't these separate boxes?): To Repel Ghosts by Kevin Young, a book of poetry inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which I picked up at the Brooklyn Museum while on book tour.
• Finish a Book You Started and Put Down: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. The second section of this book, on processed food, was dry and slow, and I almost gave up on it. But I am super interested in the section on the rise of organic farming and look forward to the final section on foraging food, the reason I picked up the book in the first place. As I slowly work on a series of lyric essays about food and culture, I am finding Pollan's research and writing mostly delightful and always informative.

Of course, none of these books are by women, nor are they in translation. So, here's what's next for me:

• Written by An Author From Another Country: Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf
• Award-Winning Author: The Appointment by Herta Müller
• Fiction: The Hottest Dishes of Tatar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky

I also participated in the Seattle Public Library's Your Next Five Books program, asking for smart, zippy books by women, ideally in translation. I'll let you know what they recommend!  (In the meantime, if you are looking for recommendations from me, here are my previous posts on women in translation.) What are you reading this summer?UPDATE (5/30/18): Here are the five "smart, zippy books by women" that the Seattle Public Library recommended. I am particularly excited about Umami by Lala Jufresa! From the title, to the author's name, to the promise of a precocious 12-year-old girl protagonist (a soft spot for me), this book will for sure go on my Recommended by a Librarian bingo square.

Paintings helped me grope through the dark of my first draft of Daughters of the Air. I wrote a guest blog post about that process on Lisa Romeo's blog. Here's how the piece begins:

When I was just starting to write seriously, I fetishized notebooks—and, like an eight-year-old—stickers.  I preferred black, hard-backed notebooks with graph paper that forced my writing into small, neat boxes.  My favorite treat was popping into a stationary store in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, to buy a cheap book of Dover Art Stickers depicting famous paintings by Michelangelo, Kahlo, Goya, and the like. I was trying to write the first draft of my first novel, Daughters of the Air, using Hemingway’s supposed model of 300 words a day, no more, no less, stopping mid-sentence and all that jazz.continue reading

Years later, still enraptured with the process, I ended up teaching several classes on writing from art for Hugo House at the Henry Art Gallery (you can see my students' work alongside the art that inspired them in these e-booklets the Henry made here and here) as well as several blog posts for Ploughshares, including this one on writing from abstract art. And, my next novel features an artist. And, many of my essays engage with art in one way or another, like this one on Goya, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. All this writing about writing—it's time for me to get back to a gallery and refill the well!

Over the summer, while immersing myself in Jess Walter's fiction in preparation for interviewing him in December (you can now watch his Word Works talk on time, and the Q & A,  here on YouTube), I reread his story "Don't Eat Cat" and felt compelled to write my own zombie story. And, because it's me, it's a bit a fairy tale-ish. "Scrolling Through the Feed" went online this morning in Cascadia Magazine, a new publication focusing on the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia to Oregon. I'm happy there's a new venue gathering long-form journalism, fiction, and poetry from the region, and one that that thinks beyond our borders.It feels somehow appropriate for the story to go up on the same day of the State of the Union, which I will not watch. Thankfully, I'm reading tonight at the Literary Happy Hour at Capitol Cider, alongside Bill Carty, Jarret Middleton, and Jekeva Philips, hosted by Josh Potter. It runs from 5-7 pm. In line with their "drafts and drafts" theme, I'll give a micro-craft talk on one of the earliest inspirations for Daughters of the Air.  Speaking of which, this is your last chance (ever?) to enter to win a free copy of the novel on Goodreads.  Go get it!

The term "dumpster fire" has been used in reference to 2017 at least several million times. At one point in October, I considered taking some classes on how to cope with anxiety and insomnia that were organized specifically in response to our collective ongoing sense of doom. I didn't though—because I was overwhelmed! Ha.Despite everything, I need to celebrate 2017 on a personal level. Daughters of the Air, which I'd toiled over for years, finally came out, and people are reading it and telling me they are enjoying it! Michael and I celebrated the holiday season with candles and latkes and lights and dim sum and snow (!) and The Shape of Water (a beautiful love story!) and chocolate peanut butter pie and New Year's Eve back at the Hotel Sorrento's Fireside Lounge for reading (me, Teffi's Subtly Worded, him Hanna Krall's Chasing the King of Hearts, which I'm happily adding to my Women in Translation Month queue), writing, live jazz, people watching, and bubbles. What more could I ask for?The day after Shelf Awareness called Daughters "a striking debut from a writer to watch," The Seattle Review of Books included it among five Seattle novels that made Paul Constant's year:

Anca Szilágyi’s Daughters of the Air is a fantastic debut — a magical realist fairy tale set in gritty New York City. It’s the kind of book that leaves you utterly confounded at the end, as you try to remember all the twists and turns that you took along the way. It feels like an impossible book, somehow — a product of alchemy, a creation of unearthly talents.

Wow! The book hasn't been panned yet, but when it does, I'll hang on to these two reviews for dear life. I was also super happy to see Tara Atkinson's novella Boyfriends included in the end-of-year list; I gobbled it one sitting and highly recommend it.Yesterday afternoon, I was thrilled to see The Seattle Times reviewed Daughters too—my first review in a major American newspaper!

Anca L. Szilágyi’s intense debut novel, "Daughters of the Air," locates a deeply personal story against the surreal backdrop of [Argentina's Dirty War].

  [gallery ids="4953,4952" type="rectangular"]I'll be moseying up to a newsstand later today so I can rustle up the paper and feel the newsprint on my fingers.In other news...

• Every year, I strive to collect 100 rejections. (Why? See this wonderful Lit Hub article by Kim Liao.) In 2016, I made it to 106, plus eight acceptances. In 2017, I garnered 93 rejections and 16 acceptances. This is actually bad in terms of my other annual goal, which is to be rejected 90% of the time. I need to aim higher.
• There are just four spots left in my online Fiction II class at Hugo House, which begins on January 14. You can sign up here.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this longer-than-usual blog post! As a gift, here is a Goodreads giveaway for you. Already read Daughters? Leaving a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or Powell's would help spread the word! You can do this regardless of how you obtained the book (other bookstores, my publisher, the library, and all that fun stuff).Onward!

Well, gosh, November snuck up on me! I try not to let a whole month go by without popping in over here, so here's what's been cooking.  Daughters of the Air will be out in 18 days (you might add it to your Goodreads list to be notified of giveaways); the last several weeks featured early mornings hunched over my laptop pitching book critics and events to bookstores and a handful of book clubs. Anxiety-fueled self-googling is at peak levels, which, yes, I know I should not be doing. But every now and again someone says something lovely about the book, which, as I've said on Instagram, has me rolling around like a happy puppy. (Also: I am increasingly on Instagram, where I overuse creepy filters, such in the photo above.)I just finished teaching for the first time a fiction thesis writing class in the online MA program I work for. It's an interesting class that coaches students through the first 30-50 pages of a novel or story collection, and I am embarking upon it once again very soon, just as my own novel will be hitting shelves. Our final week's discussion on paths to publication (traditional vs. hybrid vs. self-publishing) will be rather timely.  In related news, as I head out on book tour next year, I'll be teaching online for Hugo House as well: an eight-week intermediate fiction class touching on point of view, dialogue, and scene construction. Watch for one-day classes at Chicago's StoryStudio and Port Townsend's Writers' Workshoppe! Amidst all this activity, I'm looking forward to some holiday downtime, if that is even possible. Lately I've been starting my day with Anne Carson's Plainwater and ending it with Mavis Gallant's A Fairly Good Time: a superb literary sandwich. Before the year is over, I hope to get to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Gothic novel The House of the Seven Gables. I picked it up from a used bookstore in Montreal, The Word, just before graduating from college...in 2004. Yes, I guess it's about time I get to that one.Stay tuned for stories forthcoming from Lilith Magazine, the New Zealand-based Geometry, and the new Pacific Northwest-based Cascadia Magazine. If you'd like monthly news in your in-box, which will include information for upcoming events across the country, you can sign up here. Until launch day!

Oh boy, oh boy! Things are getting real. My debut novel, Daughters of the Air (formerly known as Dirty), will be released on December 5, 2017. You can pre-order it starting today: from your local independent bookstore (like Elliott Bay Book Company) via IndieBound, directly from Lanternfish Press, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.Why are pre-orders important? Well, they show booksellers there's enthusiasm for the book, which means they order more books, and they all count towards the first week of sales--so the accumulation of pre-orders gives books a shot at the bestseller list in the first week it's out.This has been such a long time in the making; the seedlings were planted as far back as 2001, when I spent a month at the National Institutes of Health, recovering from surgery. In fact, I have a very personal essay about that time, and how I decided to seriously pursue writing, in Catapult today. You can read "Art Therapy Before Surgery" here. Then, come see all the incredibly kind things people are saying about the book here.I love the cover art by Nichole DeMent, a piece called "Bird Moon" that was originally mixed media encaustic. I can't stop staring at it. Nichole's work is super dreamy, and I've coveted it for my novel since coming across it in 2013. Over on Lanternfish Press's blog, I shared more thoughts on Nichole's work and how my writing process draws from visual art. I've been hugging my advanced review copy since it arrived in August and have been so grateful for editorial director Christine Neulieb's championing of the book as well as all the good, hard work going on at Lanternfish Press.If you're in Seattle, please come to the launch party at the Hotel Sorrento, hosted by Hugo House, on the night of the release, December 5, at 7:30 pm!Want to stay in the loop about other events and related hooplah? Subscribe to my short & sweet monthly newsletter here. Thank you for your support! 

Sharpen your pencils: I'm teaching two classes at Hugo House this fall. Member registration opens today and general registration opens August 22. Scholarships are available: apply here by August 25!

• Wall-to-Wall Writing Prompts will be a fun-for-everyone one-day writing bonanza. I'm bringing in all my favorite prompts. If you're eager to kick start some new writing, this one's for you. Come with some overheard lines of dialogue and leave with six story openings and a plan to finish at least one. Meets Saturday, September 30, 1-4 pm. Sliding scale pricing available for this class. Please call Hugo House at (206) 322-7030.
• Fiction I  is a six-week intro to fiction, with a special focus on character, plot, and landscape. We'll read short stories from James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Flannery O'Connor, Sherman Alexie, and Louise Erdrich, among others. Writing prompts in and out of class will be geared toward writing a short story, though of course all the skills covered are applicable to novels. We'll also learn the basics of the workshop model. Meets Saturdays from October 14 to November 18, 1-3 pm.

Hope to see you then!

 Hello, hello! I have three readings this month:

• Saturday, June 10, 5-7 pm: I'm reading with Vancouver, B.C.-based novelist and musician Leanne Dunic and my fellow 2015 Jack Straw fellow Bernard Grant at Chin Music Press's Pike Place Market showroom. It's a lovely bookshop with views of the water. Michael will host! Facebook event here.  Update 6.7.17: The Seattle Review of Books literary event of the week!
• Saturday, June 24, 10 am-12 pm: June Write-In at Hugo House Co-Presented with Write Democracy.  I'm going to read a new essay in this series supporting free speech and the value of arts in our democracy. I'll be joined by afrose fatima ahmed and Catherine Bull. The event will include writing prompts!
• Tuesday, June 27, 5-7 pm: Capitol Cider Literary Happy Hour. This series mixes happy hour with readings and craft talks. Fun!

 Please join me at the Central Library for Elissa Washuta's reading "Seattle's Fremont and the Centerless Universe" on Saturday, February 18 at 2 pm. Elissa spent the summer researching and writing in the Northwest tower of the Fremont Bridge. She'll read an excerpt of the work spun out of that residency, exploring Seattle's waterways, bridges, and spirits. And the neon Rapunzel! It's an honor to discuss this project with Elissa, a dear friend, fellow UW MFA alum, and ridiculously talented author.Apropos of landscape, there are still spots available in my Hugo House class Writing About Place. Class meets Wednesdays 2/22-3/29, 5-7 pm. Want to dream up a utopia? Destroy a dystopia? Burrow into memories of home or explore a foreign city?  We'll write lots, read great stories, and maybe share some snacks from George's, my favorite Polish deli, around the corner from Hugo House.Looking ahead to spring, I'm teaching an online webinar on Contemporary Fairy Tales via Inked Voices on Saturday, April 29, 9 am-10:15 am PST (12 pm-1:15 pm EST). You can also opt in for a critique of a four-page fairy tale here.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - Hunters in the Snow (Winter) - 1565

This winter, I'm teaching Writing About Place at Hugo House. In this six-week class, we'll read stories by Flannery O'Connor, Louise Erdrich, and Ursula LeGuin, among other illustrious authors. We'll write about places we know, places we don't know, and places that exist only in our imaginations. And, we'll talk about memory, research, and world building. Class meets Wednesdays 5-7 pm from 2/22-3/29. Hugo House is located in First Hill, an easy-peasy trip from downtown and right next to the always-free Frye Art Museum. Speaking of place, if you've not been to the Hugo House's temporary home, you're in for treat, with a light-filled atrium and mysterious winding hallways.  Registration is now open. The scholarship deadline is 12/16 and there's an early bird discount until 12/19! Hope to see you there.

As the year winds down into its darkest days, I hope you'll join me for one of these events. If you come to two, I will give you a lollipop.

• Friday, December 2, at 8 pm: The Furnace Says Goodnight at Hollow Earth Radio. Thirteen Furnace writers contributed pieces that Corinne and I have woven into a single story. The pieces are at turns raw, luminous, defiant, and hopeful. I'm super excited to see the collaboration come alive on stage.  And there will be klezmer music! Please come help us celebrate our last performance. If you're not in town, you can tune in online at hollowearthradio.org.
• Wednesday, December 7, at 7 pm: Superfriends: Moss + Pacifica at Open Books. Two literary magazines near and dear to me are having launch parties for their latest issues. I'm in Moss #6! Pacifica published my first poem back in March.
• Tuesday, December 13, at 7 pm: Seattle Fiction Federation at Richard Hugo House.  A fiction-full night! I'm reading alongside Steve Sibra, Lucy Hitz, and Donna Miscolta, whose story collection Hola and Goodbye just came out from Carolina Wren Press. There's also an open mic, so come with up to 5 minutes of fiction to share.

I'm back from a family trip to Orcas Island. Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, we spotted skittering kingfishers and a great blue heron in flight--its path strangely loping. Then, in Orcas, there were the requisite cows, sheep, and horses; a buck crunching on dead leaves; and sweet doe eating dandelions. We went to the old strawberry barreling plant in the hamlet of Olga, where there are no longer any strawberry fields. And M & I baked our bones in a sauna that may have been close to 200° F. How refreshing!Now I'm in back-to-school mode. A few tidbits of note:

• On Sunday, September 18, I'm teaching a free one-day class on contemporary fairy tales at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library.
• On Saturday, October 22, I will be one of 40+ featured artists at Artist Trust's 30th Birthday Party. Tickets are $25 and proceeds support this amazing organization and all the hard work it does in Washington State. I have felt their impact profoundly as a recipient of their inaugural Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. But they have been a helpful resource for me long before that; I attended a number of their grant writing workshops and compiled some of my notes in a post here.
• Finally, I'm pleased to be offering one-on-one writing coaching via Hugo House's new manuscript consultation program. You can learn all about here.

In other news, I have a few pieces forthcoming--a collage essay about a fruit (in the meantime here's a post I wrote about nectarines), a short story inspired by my recent trip to the Netherlands, and two short-short fairy tales. I'll be sure to post links to these pieces as they become available.

Behold, Seattle's gloriously long spring, stretching from February to late June. In my youth, the colors of my birthday month featured gray slush and the unnatural blue icing on Carvel ice cream cakes. Now, there is a profusion of pink in all the azaleas, rhododendrons, early cherry blossoms, meaty camellias.Speaking of meat, I'm reading at a"Moveable Feast" themed reading on Saturday, March 5 at 7 pm, alongside my fellow Jack Straw'ster Bernard Grant and Emily Holt. They're promising a themed cocktail and open mic to follow, so come have a drink and bring food-themed work to share. This will be at a private home in Madrona on 34th and Columbia, as a part of the roving Makeshift Reading Series. Incidentally, this is also the second time I'm reading at a private home, which is just a lovely experience. A few weeks ago, I read at a party Artist Trust threw for me (!), hosted by Gar LaSalle. It was surreal and delightful and an honor. Pictures here!Then on Wednesday, April 6 at 7 pm, I'm reading at the third anniversary edition of Lit Fix at Chop Suey, alongside Anastacia Tolbert, Michelle Peñaloza, Sean Beaudoin, Gint Aras, and acoustic solo project The Wild. I'll be reading nonfiction, a genre I've been diving deeper into in the last year or so, and which I've never performed before.Lastly, on Wednesday, April 13, I'm returning to Castalia, the University of Washington MFA program's monthly series at Hugo House. Details on the line up to come!I'll have copies of my chapbook I Loved You in New York on hand at each of these readings, for $5. You can also get them from alice blue books at the APRIL book expo on March 20, at AWP in Los Angeles March 31-April 2, or via Etsy.

There are still some spots in my 30-minute, $10 online class Powerful Objects, meeting December 9 at 7 pm.  This micro-class is via OneRoom, an online platform designed specifically for creative writing classes allowing real-time interaction via video. The format of the micro-class is a great way to sneak in some writing in this busy time of year, if I do say so myself. Here is the class description:

Italo Calvino wrote that “the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships.” We’ll read Kate Bernheimer’s short-short story “Pink Horse” to see how she uses imagery and detail to bring out the psychic power of a particular object. Then we’ll do a writing exercise exploring a character’s relationship with an object. Register here.

In 2016, I'm teaching 1000 Words a Week, a six-week class in which--you guessed it--we will write 1000 words a week. It's like NaNoWriMo but at a more merciful pace. Class meets Thursdays 7-9 pm, starting January 14. General registration opens December 8; if you're a Hugo House member you can register today. Scholarships are available! Apply by December 14. Class description here:

Each week we’ll write 1000 words using big-picture and fine-grain prompts. In class, we’ll lightly workshop pieces, focusing on questions like “What creates energy in this story?” and “What do you want to know more about?” Stories may be part of a larger work or stand alone. We’ll also discuss writers’ thoughts on writing, from classics like Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” to newer essays like Rikki Ducornet’s “The Deep Zoo.” Students will leave class with 5000 new words. Register here.

Finally, I am teaching a mini-lesson called The Priceless Detail at Hugo House's Write-O-Rama, this Saturday at 12 pm & 1 pm.  Here is the class description:

Good liars know that selective detail, not a pile of facts, make a more convincing story. In discussing Chekhov's exceptional use of detail, Francine Prose notes that we live in detail, remember in detail, identify, recognize, and recreate in detail. But finding the right detail in fiction takes a lot of sifting. We'll look to excerpts from Chekhov for inspiration, then immerse ourselves in an exercise drawing on keen observations of our own experiences. Register here.

Wishing you a writing-full season & 2016!

Hugo House's fall course catalog is now available. I'm teaching three classes, listed below. Scholarships are available and applications are due August 24. Hope to see you around Hugo House soon!

• All Talk: Dialogue Intensive, a one-day class, meeting September 26, 1-5 pm.
• Second Helping: How Food Improves Your Fiction, a one-day class, meeting October 24, 1-5 pm.
• Visual Inspiration, a six-week class at the Henry Art Gallery, meeting Thursdays, 6-8 pm, September 17-October 29 (no class October 22--that's Lit Crawl!)

I'm also happy to offer writing coaching. If you're interested, email me at anca (dot) l (dot) szilagyi (at) gmail (dot) com, and tell me what you're working on and what kind of coaching you are looking for, and we'll go from there.

I'm really looking forward to teaching a new short story class at Hugo House about Anton Chekhov and his influence on modern short story writing. So many craft techniques in wide use today originated from Chekhov, and I learned a lot deeply engaging with his stories. In fact, my story "Old Boyfriends" started out as an imitation of the structure and themes in "Gusev". In addition to reading iconic stories from Chekhov, we'll read Mavis Gallant and Jhumpa Lahiri and Ehud Havazelet, and try our hands at a range of techniques. Here's a micro-lesson preview of the class. I hope to see there, Mondays 7-9 pm, starting April 27!